This Martin Luther King holiday, let’s not forget who put
the “D” in American Democracy.
No, it wasn’t Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman or
Ronald Reagan.
It is none other than Martin Luther King.
Without Dr. King’s work spearheading the Civil Rights
Movement, the U.S. could not call itself a great liberal democracy
nor promote its core values and way of life to other nations such
as Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
For that reason, the U.S. celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day
as a national holiday.
Who would think that just 40 years ago, a large portion of the
U.S.’s black population could not be served food with a smile
and a little bit of respect?
This was the U.S. before the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This act
established fundamental rights for all American citizens, something
the American Revolution of 1776 did not.
My mother, a young Chinese immigrant in the early 1960s, felt
neither black nor white, and was fearful of choosing between a
black or a white fountain. She was told by a white man that she
could drink at the white fountain but was unsure, so she simply
drank from the sink inside.
I urge all people to remember the alliances that great leaders
must forge. Some are bonds of friendships, while others are
intellectual.
In regard to the latter, one of King’s mentors was Mahatma
Gandhi. Much of the American Civil Rights Movement and its tactics
were based on nonviolent, social protest movements that Gandhi
successfully led twice, once in South Africa and the second in
India.
Likewise, both King and Gandhi’s private journals state
their admiration and respect for the poets Henry David Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Gandhi states that their writings led him to focus on
nonviolence and the credo “an eye for an eye makes the whole
world blind.”
This year during Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let’s
remember the contributions of both Martin Luther King and Mahatma
Gandhi toward making the U.S. what it is today.
Furthermore, let your gold be the ability to think
independently, borrow freely from all great thinkers, and forge
alliances that unite all humankind.
Chang is a graduate student alumnus from the class of
2000.